Heaven and Hell: My Life in the Eagles by Wendy Holden, Don Felder Page B

smelled of steel. To begin with, it was fun, having snowball fights and fooling around. Once the novelty had worn off, however, the snow brought further isolation to an already strained situation. Unable to escape, we were trapped inside together, day in, day out, and the tensions between us became less easy to hide. Those bitter few months reminded me of my final year in my parents’ home, and I was sorry for the bad feeling I’d created. One day that winter I sat down at a desk I’d built out of old lumber that was lying around in the yard. Taking a pen and paper, I wrote my mother a letter, telling her where I was and that I was OK. “Thank you for all the years you raised me under harsh conditions,” I said, “and for all you taught me. Only now am I beginning to appreciate what a good mother you were.” I even thanked her for dragging me to church by my ear. I sent the letter off, with my address on the envelope. It was my first contact with my parents in two years, and a letter came back by return mail.
     
    “Dear Don,” she wrote. “How wonderful to hear from you. I’ve been worried sick. . . .” Thus began a correspondence that continued with her for many years. My father never wrote a word.
     

    I began to realize that my dreams of musical stardom were probably pie in the sky. It was the post-Vietnam “Me Decade,” but things certainly weren’t happening for me.
     
    Our only regular gig was at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, a progressive liberal arts place, a few hundred miles north. We saw Carlos Santana playing “Black Magic Woman” there, a big hit at the time. Arlo Guthrie was a music student at the college and they had a gamelan band, an Indonesian percussion orchestra. Driving up to Goddard one day on the way to another gig, I succumbed to a sudden compelling urge. Pulling the van over at a pay phone, I fumbled for some change and dialed the number of Susan’s family home in Boston, memorized for all time.
     
    “Hey, Mrs. Pickersgill, it’s Don, Don Felder from Gainesville. Is Susan there?”
     
    “Hello, Don. My, it’s been a while. No, dear, she doesn’t live here anymore. She’s found a place of her own. Would you like her number?”
     
    Susan was very surprised to hear from me. It had been eighteen months since we’d last seen each other. She’d just broken up with her latest boyfriend, a singer/guitarist, and was working as a secretary at the Harvard History Research Center. We chatted until my money ran out, and I told her I’d call again. A week later, I did, then again the week after that. It felt good to talk to someone who wasn’t stoned out of their mind all the time. She had a good job and her own apartment, something I couldn’t possibly have afforded. I was impressed.
     
    A couple of weeks later, Susan told me she’d be staying at her sister’s house in Scituate, on Cape Cod, babysitting. “Do you wanna come out?” she asked. “We could get to know each other again.” Looking around me at the mess of a life I was living in, I jumped at the chance. By the end of the weekend on that beautiful Atlantic shore, she and I realized how much we still loved each other. It felt like coming home.
     
     
     
     
    For the next couple of months, Susan and I commuted back and forth between Boston and Dover Plains every weekend, making up for lost time. To begin with, she was enamored of the bohemian life I was leading, living in this old colonial mansion with a band that had just cut a record, existing on a diet of zucchini sandwiches. But after a while, the veneer wore off, and she could see all the ugliness underneath, especially with the drug abuse. When Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died separate drug-related deaths that fall, I felt as I had when JFK had been killed—shocked and a little afraid. I’d seen both of them perform at Woodstock less than a year earlier. Now they were gone, cold in their graves, and their future promise had died with them.